The invention relates to a system for performing immediate point-to-point messaging over the Internet.
Communication over the Internet takes on several forms--principally e-mail, chat, video and audio. These forms of communication are used in a variety of different contexts. E-mail is generally not perceived as "real-time" or "immediate"; messages may be read hours or days after they are sent. Chat is principally used as a social medium or for information sharing--not for point-to-point communication. Video and audio are both real-time, but they are both relatively difficult to use, and widespread acceptance requires improvements in existing technology and user interfaces.
There exists, on a limited basis, an additional form of communication--popup messaging. A user A can send a popup message to another user B; the message immediately "pops up" on B's screen. The prototypical popup messaging system is the Zephyr system on MIT's campus computer network, Athena. Zephyr permits any Athena user to send popup messages to any other Athena user, but not to any user across the Internet. WinPopup by Microsoft Corp. is a Windows utility to send popup messages between users; however, WinPopup, too, only permits messaging between users on the same network, and is not capable of sending messages across the Internet. Further, both Zephyr and WinPopup are not scaleable to high user volumes; they are designed for self-contained environments with a small or moderate number of users.
Firewalls are machines commonly used for enforcing corporate network security policies; at least half of all Internet users and most business users connect to the Internet through a firewall. Firewalls represent a key impediment for real-time communication between Internet users. Firewall designs generally prohibit external entities on the Internet from connecting to internal entities protected by the firewall. While this is designed to prevent external entities from maliciously manipulating internal entities, it also has the side-effect of preventing asynchronous communication to an internal entity. Current forms of real-time Internet messaging are generally incapable of working through a firewall, without explicit firewall policy modifications by systems administrators.